It is getting harder to treat acne because the bacterium that causes it is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Adding viruses that kill this bacterium to acne treatments could restore their effectiveness, an animal study suggests, however.
鈥淚 myself have suffered from acne,鈥� says at the Israeli Phage Therapy Center, based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 鈥淚t might be cosmetic but it can have a major psychological impact.鈥�
Certain strains of a bacterium called Cutibacterium acnes are thought to be the main cause of acne, and cases of acne are often treated with antibiotics applied to the skin or swallowed as a pill, or both. But these standard treatments are becoming less effective as C. acnes becomes resistant to the antibiotics used.
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So Rimon and his colleagues isolated eight types of bacteriophages, viruses that infect and kill various types of bacteria. When a single type of phage was used to treat strains of C. acnes growing in culture, the bacteria sometimes developed resistance to the phage. However, when multiple types of phages were combined with antibiotics, they completely eradicated the antibiotic-resistant C. acnes.
Next, the team infected the skin of mice with C. acnes and showed that applying one of their phages to their skin resulted in improvements compared with controls. The team thinks this is the first demonstration that applying phages to the skin can help treat C. acnes.
The team now hopes to develop this into a treatment for people with acne, says Rimon. 鈥淲e currently are trying to find investors and drug companies that are interested in taking phages to market.鈥�
The proportion of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant strains of C. acnes around the world is rising, says a spokesperson for . In the UK, the level of resistance to various antibiotics ranges from 20 to 65 per cent.
The current guidelines are that antibiotics should be used judiciously for treating acne, but studies in the UK and US suggest that antibiotic usage is often excessive. Various alternatives to antibiotics are being explored, including preventing the inflammatory response triggered by C. acnes rather than the tackling the bacterium itself.
Rimon says one of the reasons his team wants to develop a phage-based acne treatment is to pave the way for treating more serious infections with phages. The phage centre has already helped to treat about 20 people with life-threatening infections, he says. In Israel, as in many countries, regulators allow the use of phage therapies only as a last resort when all conventional approaches have failed.
In Belgium, however, phage therapies are starting to be used more often thanks to a 2019 change in regulations specifically intended to make it easier for doctors to try this approach.
Reference: BioRxiv, DOI:
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